urban mountaineering

Now that I have a significant percentage of my gear to head up the mountains, I'm feeling more technically prepared. On a side note, however, as it creeps closer and closer, I feel more and more anxious, and the incessant training doesn't help me feel more physically prepared, is just bringing me closer to burning out.

Nonetheless, I decided to toss the gear I had, plus some full bottles of water, cookbooks and landscape architecture textbooks, into my backpack and scale some steeper portions of Queen Anne last night after work. It was a great evening for it, calm and sunny with a lovely sunset over the Olympics. I mostly took the stairs that wind between the stately homes in the southwest portion of the hillside, but also hoofed it down and back up again through Kinnear Park. Which was comical, because as the park is a steep hillside full of invasive weeds above the industrial Interbay neighborhood, it's not all that well-taken care of, and is full of homeless people camping there. It wasn't dark yet, so it didn't intimidate me, but because I was wearing a giant backpack, it appeared as though the many men whom I passed along the way, welcoming me with smiles, nods, and even waves, were ready to welcome me into their tribe. I was friendly, but kept moving.

There are quite a few out of the way nooks and crannies that dead-end into hillsides (often with fantastic views) in that area that you might never come across, even as a Queen Anne resident, and it was cool to have a reason to stumble across them. There are quite a few homes that have front porches opening onto pedestrian paths and stairs because the grades are too steep for roads. Kind of Montmartre-sque, in that respect.

I ended up tooling up and down until it got dark (which is quite late, like nine thirty or ten in these parts this time of year), and made my way to my old neighborhood, and chatted with my former neighbors. By the time I started heading home it was well past dark, and I realized that the cats were out of food, so I figured what better way to make use of the backpack on my back, and the need for training, than to pick some up there on Upper Queen Anne and lug it home? After I left Safeway I realized I had little for me to eat at home, either, so I stopped at Metropolitan Market and threw some pasta salad in there for me, too. Which totally cracked me up, but apparently not other people quite as much, because everyone either didn't notice, or appeared to avoid eye contact with me. Which made me even more amused, secretly.

I had a hard time dragging myself out of bed this morning- big surprise.